Siri Mitchell - Chateau of Echoes

I enjoyed making him laugh.

It was also enjoyable to see him smile. Smiles started in his lips, and sometimes, if I were lucky, they would crimp lines beneath his eyes and cause them to glint. They were quiet smiles.

In myriad ways Cranwell seduced the senses. His eyes, his laugh, his smile. The way he carried himself. The clothes he wore. The textures and layers that made the man.

Sliding a spatula under the last crêpe, I flipped it onto the top of the pile.

At least I had identified him. At least I knew who my nemesis was.

The problem was that, in spite of everything, I liked Cranwell. And maybe he really had changed. Maybe he wasn’t the playboy he had been. I decided that the challenge would be to avoid falling in love with him. And that was going to cause some difficulties. I could tell already, because on top of everything else, Cranwell liked to listen. And heaven help the woman who finds a man who will listen to her.

I comforted myself with the thought that the first step in waging war is taking measure of the enemy.

T he next evening, when Sévérine came for her dinner tray, I remembered to ask her a question that had been on my mind. “Is this the year of your Catherinette ?”

“ Oui .” It was the first time I’d seen her blush. In fact, she blushed so badly, her cheeks matched the color of the scarf she’d wound around her neck.

“What’s a Catherinette ?” Cranwell was looking at Sévérine with interest.

“Oh, Robert, it is nothing.” Sévérine waved a graceful hand at Cranwell as if to swat his question away.

“What is it, Freddie?” He fingered the collar of his moss green v-neck sweater the way he always did when he was curious about something.

“It’s the year of Sévérine’s twenty-fifth birthday. And because she’s single, we celebrate. And she pleads with Sainte-Catherine to send her a husband.”

Sévérine shushed Cranwell’s laughter. “It is not done so much any more.”

“Of course it is!” I’d had friends in Paris who’d celebrated. “Especially the twenty-five kisses.”

“The what?” Cranwell was getting into the idea. I could tell.

“It is an old custom. Very vieux jeu .” Sévérine had jammed her hands into the back pockets of her tight-fitting indigo jeans.

“Let us celebrate with you. It’ll be fun.” Cranwell’s eyes held a dangerous twinkle.

Sévérine looked from Cranwell to me; I could tell she didn’t quite trust us.

“Seriously. It will be fun.” I handed her a dinner tray. “Tell me what your favorite meal is and I’ll fix it.”

“ Foie gras, homards, et croque-em-bouche .”

I lifted an eyebrow. Liver paté, lobster, and a pyramid of tiny puff pastries filled with cream and wrapped in spun caramel. Since I’d insisted on celebrating, she was going to make me work.

But she deserved a celebration. Especially since she had no one else to celebrate with.

Cranwell waylaid her on her route to the stairs. “I wanted to ask you about the grail.”

She stopped so suddenly that she lost her grip on the tray. It clattered to the floor. “Frédérique! I am so sorry.”

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” Nothing had broken and most of the food had stayed on the tray. I got out a new plate and began to reconstruct her dinner.

“You had asked me about the grail, Robert? What does this have to do with Alix?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably nothing. Just following a thought.”

“I am only an expert on Alix.”

“But surely you’ve studied the legends if you’ve studied medieval history.”

“ Oui, oui, oui . Of course. In the context of the time period of Alix.”

“So it left Israel with Joseph of Arimathea and then came here? To Brittany?”

“This is one story. But there are many others.”

“What are the other versions?”

She blew air from her cheeks. “There is the one where it is not a cup or a chalice at all. This is a Celtic one. The grail is a graal or a cauldron.”

“A kettle?”

“For cooking? Yes.”

“And the quest for it was a search by Arthur?”

“By his knights. But it is more than a search. It is an obsession of all of his knights. But only Galahad succeeds. Because he is the most pure. And in the end, it kills him.”

“So it’s dangerous.”

“Obsessions are always dangerous. And this obsession takes away the best knights from the Table Rond .”

“And leaves it undefended?”

“ Non . Not this so much as it lowers the moral.”

“Morale?”

“No. The moral. The character of the kingdom. But remember, it is just a fairy story, Robert.”

“Maybe. But then people still search for it, don’t they?”

“I have a problem.” Cranwell probed me with insistent eyes.

So did I. I’d given myself ten minutes to put dinner on the table, and the meat was taking longer to cook than I’d expected. “What?”

“It’s too cold in my room.”

Don’t start with me. “Generally, fourteenth-century castles were built for defensive purposes, not for warmth. Have you tried wearing a hat?”

“Really. I can’t type.”

Turning my head, I glanced at him over my shoulder. To his credit, he was wearing moleskin trousers and a heavy cream fisherman’s turtleneck sweater. “Did you try-”

“A fire doesn’t help. Opening the flue only creates a draft.”

I didn’t have time for his complaints. I checked the meat again. Almost done. “Do you have any solutions?”

“Can I work down here?”

I dropped the pan. It banged onto the stove. Thankfully, it didn’t fall to the floor. “Here?”

“It’s warm. You have an outlet. I could just set myself up right there.” He was pointing at my desk. My desk. He had invaded my house, captured my thoughts, and kidnapped my heart. Now he wanted my desk.

There are limits.

“Cranwell, you can’t have my desk. You can bring down a table from elsewhere in the house, but you cannot have my desk.”

“Great. I’ll do it right now.” I was finally in a position to turn around to talk to him, but all I saw was his back disappearing up the stairwell.

The next morning, when I made my way down to the kitchen before dawn, I discovered that Cranwell was already hard at work, sitting at the table he’d placed at the back of the kitchen, in his robe and silk pajamas.

Lucy lifted her head when she saw me, then sighed, and dropped it back on her paws.

“Has she been out?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“About-” he paused to look at his watch. “An hour ago.”

“You’ve been here since four?”

“Yes.”

He hadn’t turned from the computer since I’d walked into the kitchen.

“Espresso?”

“No. Already got it.”

Really? Good for him.

After making my espresso, I carried on with my routine, rolling out croissants and then folding them. By 6:15, I was taking them out of the oven.

I put together Cranwell’s normal tray, with an espresso and two croissants, accompanied by a small pot of confiture .

“Thanks.” He looked up from the computer long enough to flash me a smile. “They’re talking to me, Freddie. I have to keep typing.”

Two weeks later, I was in the kitchen and working on my breads by 5:30, but Cranwell and Lucy were nowhere to be seen. It looked, in fact, as if they hadn’t been down at all that morning.

After I had shaped all six baguettes, placed them in the oven, and baked them, I took a break and had an espresso. Happening to glance at the calendar above my desk, I was struck by how quickly November had passed. It was already the 24 th, Sainte-Flora day, which seemed odd. If you were going to dedicate a day to a person named Flora, why not give her a day in the spring?